Research firm Strategy Analytics has stated that it expects Samsung to widen the lead in the smartphone market over Apple during 2013. The research firm predicts Samsung will see 35% growth this year helped in part by a wider product line. The research firm also believes that to help counter the increased competition by Samsung that Apple might launch a smaller and cheaper “iPhone mini” next year.

A smaller-screened iPhone has been rumored for a number of years, but has never come to fruition. Apple addresses the “cheaper” bullet point by discounting previous generation iPhone models to selling alongside the current generation model. For example, the previous generation iPhone 4S is priced at $99 with a two-year contract, while the iPhone 4 is available for free with a two-year contract. The current generation iPhone 5 starts at $199.

However, with Apple finally rolling out a smaller iPad mini that has seen significant sales success, the market may be right for Apple to bring a pint-sized iPhone to the market.

The analytics firm believes that globally smartphone shipments will increase 27% during 2013 to 875,000,000 units. While 27% growth is a brisk pace, it is a significant decline from the 41% growth the smartphone market saw in 2012. Strategy Analytics blames slowing growth in North America, China, Asia, and Western Europe.

The research firm predicts that Samsung will sell 290 million smartphones in 2013, which is a significant increase from the estimated 215 million smartphones Samsung sold in 2012. It should be noted, however, that Samsung’s own internal numbers suggest that it will sell a more substantial 390 million smartphones for the year.

Apple is predicted to sell 180 million smartphones in 2013 for 33% increase from its 2012 sales numbers. If the research firm's predictions come true Samsung will hold 33% of the smartphone market with Apple a bit behind at 21%.

Seriously, stop saying double the battery life. That is a flat out lie... As I have posted elsewhere the ip5 has even lower talk time than the gs3 you keep bringing up... and no 1 carries a removable battery around ,the point is when you go on a trip or to an event and need extra battery power you have it if you need it.

It is over double the battery life with both LTE and Wifi, how is that a lie?

As for talk time, cool, great for people who talk on their phones.

On a trip I just pack a power cord, no big deal.

Like I've said before, I think its fine that there are phones with a replaceable battery. The tradeoff for faster hardware with better apps and more battery life works out for me. If there was a phone with all of the above, and a replaceable battery life without compromising size, THEN it'd be worth talking about for me.

"It is over double the battery life with both LTE and Wifi, how is that a lie?"

How? Right here. "If having double the battery life "

It does not have double the battery life. It has even less talk time than the ONE phone you compare it against and double the LTE browsing time. You are cherry picking and you know it. Why you are deliberately trying to falsify things while calling yourself unbiased is beyond me, but I will call you on it every time I see it.

Dude, you can't quote out of context to try and win an argument, it doesn't work that way!

quote: "It is over double the battery life with both LTE and Wifi "

You omitted the bold part to try and make a point, a point that I wasn't even trying to make. Come on dude!

If you want to bring up talk time then that's fine, but don't try and twist what I said specifically about LTE and wifi browsing time into something else. Even then there is only about a 20% difference in talk time versus about a 2x difference in browse time.

I'm not even bringing up CPU and GPU performance to be nice. I don't know why you're getting so bent out of shape over all this anyway, other phones will eventually catch up in most specs. HTC is already doing much better with LTE (7 hours or so) now that they have the newer LTE chips that the iPhone 5 also uses.

GPU performance, app quality, resistance to malware, and timely OS updates are things that won't happen on Android hardware anytime soon, but you can be sure that CPU performance and battery life will catch up shortly. Plus you have bigger screens and the other things that come with larger chassis (replaceable batteries and SD card slots). Other Android handsets like the Nexus 4 are dropping those things that fans like to brag about (Flash support, replaceable batteries, SD cards, etc) as they get smaller and more integrated, but again those choices that bigger phones give will still be there.

Yes, I don't like carrying around extra things like batteries. If you do then that's totally cool!

Choices, decisions, these are things that actually exist and people are free to make them. I gladly trade more battery life for not needing to carry more batteries, but obviously there are people who prefer the opposite in real life, and that's totally cool.

"So, I think the same thing of the music industry. They can't say that they're losing money, you know what I'm saying. They just probably don't have the same surplus that they had." -- Wu-Tang Clan founder RZA